Planning a Novel, Part 2: Pre-Writing

The second installment of a series I'm writing for The Master's Artist. Enjoy!

In Part 1, we considered the "grid," the conceptual landscape of the novel you're about to write. It's divided into chapters and scenes, and we superimposed a dramatic structure, which gave us a rough sense of what should happen when. (Or rather, what sort of thing should happen when, since we haven't quite reached the what.) You might think of the grid as an old-fashioned card catalog that's been emptied out for your use. It's a set of pigeonholes, nothing more. The real work begins when you try to fill them.

Sometimes a story writes itself. You begin on the first page, stringing one word after another, and before you know it the book takes on a life of its own. The planning, if there is any, happens subconsciously. The writing experience is ecstatic and it carries you forward to the rollicking conclusion. I'm guessing this is how many first novels are written, and some of them go on to be published, though not the vast majority. What happens, though, when you attempt a follow-up and the story doesn't magically happen? That's the dilemma I found myself in. My first novel, written in the heady days of college, was one of those late-night osmosis affairs. The stack of pages grew and grew, and it all seemed so outrageously simple. I was convinced I must be some kind of genius. Then, in grad school, I tried to knock out a more ambitious kind of novel, and I ended up stymied for something like eight years. I knew very well how to write a novel, but I didn't know how to plan one, so the more ambitious the story became, the less able I felt to grapple it down onto the page.

Since then, I've evolved a hybrid method, an approach that allows me to do enough planning so that the writing doesn't stall, but still preserves the organic nature of the process. It starts with a conceptual grid, and the next step is the pre-writing.

INFINITE DO-OVERS
For me, it's all about false starts. I'm poised on the starting line, the gun goes off, and after sprinting a couple of yards I inevitably stumble. Gasping for air, I call for a do-over. And this happens again and again. Some people begin by writing an outline, but I plunge right into a scene. The goal is to get a handle on two big questions: (a) who's this story about, and (b) how am I going to tell it? In other words, my early attempts focus on character, tone, and point of view.

There are other ways to get a feel for your character. You could fill out questionnaires or write up a life history, for example. But I like to meet people in the moment. What I need to know about a protagonist is not so much his history but his mood or vibe. I have to find out what the lighting's like in his world, what sort of soundtrack is playing -- voice and pacing. And the only way I've found to do this reliably is to plunge into a hard scene and see what happens.

For the book I just finished planning, it took five or six attempts to get the scene right, and then I ended up not using the scene at all. Altogether, the pre-writing amounted to something like forty pages. So was it a waste?

Not at all. Those false starts gave me the point of view and settled how I'd approach the narrative. They established the hero's presence in my mind, and spun off the necessary constellation of supporting parts, so his world was both created and populated. They also taught me how to hop, skip, and jump over some complicated exposition. I figured out what had to be in the story and what I could safely rely on the reader to supply.

A PRIMER ON PUMP-PRIMING
During the pre-writing stage, you give yourself permission to fail in a big way. This is a time for experimentation, after all. Knowing you'll abandon many of these pages, it's easier to convince yourself to take some risks. Pre-writing is a little bit like creative meditation. You focus your mind on the story until it comes to life and starts answering your questions. You're priming the pump.

If you don't do this work now, the odds are you'll have to do it later. After you've written your first draft, it's time to revise. If you haven't done any planning, you may have some major problems to address. The more work you do up front, the less work you have to do on the back end. No, actually, let me rephrase that. The more you invest in planning, the more time you'll have during revision to improve your novel, rather than just fixing it.

I write myself into the novel through scenes, but that inevitably leads to other assignments. Character sketches start popping up as I invent new people and have to define their roles. Settings are fleshed out, timelines tracked. In addition to giving me a handle on the story, I end up with a ready reference for use while writing. Many of the things I work out in advance may change, and most of them won't end up in the draft -- because I've worked them out beforehand, I develop a better sense of what has to be there and what doesn't.

Pre-writing is perishable. Very little of it will be in the finished product, but it will shape the manuscript in surprising ways. If knowledge is power, then the more knowledge you have going into the first draft, the more power you have over the outcome.

So what we have now is a conceptual grid and a small stack of pages that fit into it only obliquely. A point comes during pre-writing when everything clicks. I know my characters, I know my story, and I can finally see where its major pieces fit on the grid. That's when I know it's time to move on to the next phase, which is what we'll discuss in the following installment. It's time to put flesh on bones.

Comments

[Jbaby]

this stuff is brilliant. Thanks.

[Lingchen]

Thanks for sharing your invaluable advice.